


Replacements

by Frellywellies



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 08:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6071398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frellywellies/pseuds/Frellywellies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Jed could not help but to marvel at the pair they made. She, a woman who still loved her dead husband and he a man who could not figure out how to love his wife."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Replacements

Mary Phinney had never struck him as a particularly vain woman. 

Strident, sometimes and far too stubborn for her own good, certainly. And opinionated. _Relentlessly_ so. But an excessive concern for her physical appearance had never been amongst her character flaws.

Not that she was in any way slovenly. She was always as clean and neat as any toiler in their charnel house could hope to be. She kept her hair sensibly contained and her choice in dress could best be described as “unobtrusive.” She seemed, in all things, to be more concerned with the function of a thing, rather than its appearance.

And yet, Jed could not imagine a woman on earth who would not feel a pang of loss at ruining a fine, elaborate party dress the way Mary had the night of the laundress’ surgery.

He had found himself thinking of that dress more and more in recent days. He had been surprised to see her wear it, for he never would have suspected she had such a thing on hand. He had seen the single modest bag she had brought with her from Boston, after all.

It was wholly unlike the Mary he had come to know over the weeks they had worked alongside one another. For just a moment (before he noticed the blood) he had been taken aback, just seeing her like that. It was as though he had been offered a glimpse of Mary’s past, before the war, before her Baron passed, before that little bit of persistent sadness had taken root behind her eyes.

It had seemed fitting in an awful sort of way, then, that it should be destroyed by a poor woman’s blood and her misery.

Mary, of course, had issued no complaints. In fact, she had hardly seemed to notice the horrible red splotch when she came to his room that night to assure him that the woman was resting comfortably. Instead, there was something transcendent–and familiar–in her face. Jed knew immediately what she was feeling. That wild, ceilingless joy when you yourself managed to draw someone back, however temporarily, from death. It was something rare and fine to know for certain that, despite your many flaws and failures, you had an objective use in this world. That you had truly done something for another person. 

He’d had that feeling before and tried to express it, once or twice, to other surgeons. Either he explained it poorly or they did not take his meaning, but he had never been able to look at someone and feel certain that they were experiencing the same unique elation.

Not until Mary.

_It’s in her now_ , Jed had thought, as she vanished into the darkness with a silken rustle. _She’ll never want to leave this place_. Just as he had sacrificed his marriage, his family, his comfortable life, he knew that she, too, would not be able to go without that feeling–or the possibility of it–in the future. It was a dependency as real as his upon morphine and it would get them both through the countless men (and occasional woman) whom they could not save.

He thought that if he were a better man, a less selfish one, he would be disappointed by this turn of events. He would try to discourage Miss Phinney from this way of life, constantly demanding and yet so scanty with its rewards. If he were being really honest with himself, though, he could admit that it was profoundly satisfying to look across another wounded patient and see her calm, clear gaze looking steadily back at him.

Perhaps it was some guilt, then, over these feelings that had led him to dwell upon the ruined dress. Mary had already given up so much to come to Mansion House and he believed that she would lose even more before the war ended; surely he could restore this one small thing to her.

His quest began with Miss Green, who admitted that she had been somewhat distracted the night of the ball and had only a fleeting memory of the dress Miss Phinney had worn. “It was pretty, as I recall,” she offered weakly. “Blue, yes?”

“Yes.” Jed could not hide the disappointment in his voice. He could have recognized that the dress was blue. What he needed was someone to tell him how the skirt was constructed, what the fabric was, the name of the long neckline that exposed the small hollow in her throat where her right and left clavicle met.

“There is someone who may be able to help us…” Miss Green said slowly, reluctantly. “But I’m not sure she will. Still, there’s not harm in trying, is there now?”

***

The younger Miss Green, a sylphish blonde with the upturned nose and utterly flinty eyes of all the girls of Jed’s youth, recalled the dress immediately.

“An ordinary silk evening dress with a low body, short sleeves and a double skirt. At least three years out of fashion.”

“Horrors.” Jed could not help himself, though it earned him a venomous look from the blonde girl.

“Might Mrs. Talbot be able to do up one similar?” Emma wondered.

“It’s a lot of silk,” Alice mused. “But perhaps.” She gave Jed a withering once-over which left absolutely no doubts about her assessment of him. “Though not, I imagine, for a Yankee doctor.”

“How about for money? You know, in the usual way of commercial transactions?” Jed said acidly. Being here, amongst these women and their world, which was different from his own upbringing in degree rather than character, made him irritable and snappish. He could tell that they longed to lob the same withering admonishments at him that his mother had and it was only the unbending rules of politeness that prevented them.

The younger Miss Green drew herself up to her full (though still quite petite) height. “Some things are not for sale, Dr. Foster.”

“I have an idea!” Miss Green said, clapping her hands as though she were separating scrapping dogs. 

Emma Green was clearly the diplomat of the family. Ezra had been the same way when they were growing up, always inserting himself between Jed and their father, Jed and their mother, Jed and the whole world, it often seemed. “Wait right here!” Emma said excitedly, turning and heading for the grand staircase before Jed could register his objections.

It would never cease to amaze him how fast a properly trained woman could actually move in those enormous skirts.

And then they were alone, Jed and the blonde Miss Green. She looked pointedly away at him, examining the furniture, the decor, even the walls themselves as though she had not encountered these things every day of her life. He knew that social niceties dictated that a guest never be left unattended but that clearly did not mean that Miss Alice Green had to acknowledge his presence.

He wondered idly how old she was. 15? 16? Everything had seemed very clear–and very important–when he was that age as well. She would learn soon enough how rare it was that anything really changed. The world moved in fractions of inches while human beings longed to jump, to run, to fly.

He was on the verge of talking to her (he wasn’t sure exactly what he intended to say, undoubtedly something that would be taken for an insult) when Miss Emma Green re-appeared, her arms heaped with dresses and a beneficent grin upon her face.

She was followed closely by an older colored woman in a head wrap. The other woman also carried a pile of dresses but looked considerably less enthused about the endeavour.

“I realized,” Emma said, depositing her arm load on a chaise longue, “that we might just have the largest single source of loose fabric in Alexandria right here in our very own home.”

She was clearly very pleased with her solution and Jed was loathe to discourage her but even just a casual glance at the tangle of frocks on the longue revealed them to be very colorful, very young, very Miss Emma Green, in fact. He could not imagine Mary wearing anything so fussy or indeed so girlish.

Emma held up one of the dresses (a faint yellow color that reminded Jed of nothing so much as custard) and eyed it approvingly. “Now, Dr. Foster, I have seen your wife and I believe that we are of a size, or very close at least, and Belinda can do any alterations you require.”

Jed opened his mouth to correct her and shut it again. _Of course_. Of course Emma would have presumed that he was seeking a dress for his wife, the woman he should be desperate to woo back to Alexandria.

How strange it would be, how utterly inappropriate, for him to buy clothing (and a fancy dress at that) for a woman not his wife. A woman with whom he could never hope to have anything more than a professional relationship.

All of this suddenly seemed to him a ridiculous flight of fancy. Why had he ever assumed that he would be permitted to do this? Had he imagined that the world had vanished, save for him and Mary herself?

Well, he knew now that it had not.

“Miss Green,” he cleared his throat awkwardly, “thank you so much for your assistance. But I think perhaps I should select a different sort of gift for my…wife.”

Emma’s face fell ever so slightly. This was the sort of frivolous, innocuous good deed she had likely been accustomed to doing before the war, before the only care she could offer anyone was a sip of water or a kind face to look at while they expired. “Well, you would know best, Dr. Foster,” she said, just a little bit sullenly.

“I’m not at all sure I would,” Jed told her. “But thank you just the same.”

***

Jed had developed a habit in recent days of modifying his route around the hospital so as to pass by the nurses’ rooms as frequently as possible. Before the incident at the Green home, he had not thought too deeply on this new practice of his. Now, though, it seemed yet another symptom of a disease he dared not name.

Yet he found himself again on the nurses’ floor when he saw it from the corner of his eye, a blue-flutter. The very skirt that had been pre-occupying him, in fact.

Mary’s door was open as was her custom. All of nurses understood that their rooms may, at any moment, be commandeered for emergency lodging, thus they had a tendency to treat them more as a temporary communal space than a true personal refuge.

Jed paused in the door and, before he could decide whether or not to knock, Mary turned to smile at him. “Yes?” she asked. “Do you need me?”

An utterly appropriate question for which he had no appropriate answers.

Instead, he pointed towards the ball gown, which she was in the process of hanging from the open corner of her wardrobe. “You’ve washed it,” he said.

“I’ve tried,” Mary sighed. Indeed, there was still a highly visible splotch of darkness right in the middle of the skirt. “I’m afraid there’s nothing more to be done for it.” She gestured for Jed to step inside and he obeyed.

Besides the dress, there was almost nothing of Mary herself in this room. Her other garments were shut away neatly in her wardrobe. The linens on the bed belonged to the hospital (or rather to the hotel it had once been). She had no adornments, no treasures, no knick-knacks. She kept a small photo of her husband at her bedside, a very modest sort of keepsake.

“I did not send it to the laundry,” Mary continued, “for obvious reasons.”

Jed offered her a blank look.

“Aurelia?” Mary said. “It would be…very unpleasant to scrub one’s own blood out of someone’s dress, I think.”

“Ah. Yes, I suppose it would.”

He sat down at the edge of the bed, examining the baron’s stern visage in the dim little portrait. He had a white beard, a serious face. Jed wondered, not for the first time, what their marriage had been like. It had not been long, he knew that. So at least she had been spared the slow, creeping realization that you were forever lashed to someone you did not know. Perhaps someone you no longer even wanted to know.

“Are you sorry?” he asked, more like a musing spoken aloud than a conscious question. Mary raised her eyebrows and crossed the room to sit beside him on the bed. The edge of her skirt touched the leg of his pants and though he knew it was impossible, he imagined that he could feel some of the radiant warmth from her skin through all those layers of fabric.

“It was one of the last things Gustav purchased,” she said fondly. “Before he took ill.” Her face, as it so often did when she mentioned him, grew somehow distant, as though something had shuttered inside of her. “He was always very partial to blue for me. He liked it.” There was such a fond softness to her now that Jed felt almost guilty just looking at her, as though he were trespassing upon something unbearably private.

“I used to have this idea,” Mary looked down at her folded hands as though they might offer her some answers. “That, over time, I would lose or abandon or rip or stain everything that he gave me. Everything that reminded me of him. And, on that day when every last thing was gone, I would be at peace.”

She reached out to touch the dress, pinching it delicately between her fingers as though to evaluate the quality of the material and Jed could not help but to marvel at the pair they made. She, a woman who still loved her dead husband and he a man who could not figure out how to love his wife.

“Now I will cut it down,” Mary said, her face settling into its usual bright, resolute attitude. “It will become something new and have a second life.”

That seemed to be a theme at Mansion House. Could he have imagined even six months ago that he would become an army officer? That he would spend his time not in leisurely private practice but rather wrestling panicked boys onto the operating table until long after the sun went down?

“It is probably for the best. I can’t imagine that parties shall be a major fixture of my future here.” Mary gave him one her sly smiles which always felt so illicit, as though she should not be smiling and he should not be watching her smile. And yet, here they were. “Do you know, before that ball, I had not attended such a party since…since I was Miss Green’s age, I suppose?”

He had not known that but it did not particularly surprise him. He imagined she would not have attended the ball at the Green’s home had Summers not ordered the entire staff to go.

“And I was only there fifteen minutes,” she mused, still smiling to herself, but gently now.

“Fifteen minutes?” he scoffed. “Surely that was not enough time to fill your dance card?”

She laughed a bright little rill. “It was not indeed. I did not dance.”

Jed gave her a scandalized look. “Not even once?”

She shook her head and pressed her lips very close together, the way she always did when she was trying not to encourage him.

“Well, I can’t help but feel that, as a newly minted Union officer, I should attempt to atone for the poor showing on the part of my brethren.” Jed stood up and extended his hand to her and even he could not have said whether he was having a joke.

Still seated, Mary appraised him steadily.

This, now, this was truly dangerous. As dangerous–more perhaps–as finding a replacement dress for her. He had come to rely on Mary for so many things but, chief amongst them, for putting distance between them, for pulling away before the situation became…inextricable. She had never failed him before.

Now, though, she simply arose from the bed and stepped into his arms, warm and slightly pliant. “I’ve never been very good at this,” she admitted in a low whisper as he moved her hands into the correct position for a basic waltz.

She looked up at him and there was something of a challenge in her face.

“I wasn’t either,” Jed told her, a false airiness in his voice. “But my mother drilled it into me anyway. She believed that dancing, these parties, it’s a kind of communication all its own. Whom you invite, whom you exclude, the songs selected, the steps, the partners…it all means something.”

“And did you learn to speak that language?” 

Jed laughed. “No. I went far away and learned how to cut people open. But I can still recall a step or two when pressed.”

She was peering at him with such a curious look, a little smile in the corner of his mouth. “What?” he asked.

Mary ducked her head. “Nothing. You’re just…always surprising me, Dr. Foster.”

“Jed,” he correctly quietly.

“Jed,” she answered, her voice impossibly soft.

He did not touch her any more than was strictly necessary. One hand flat on the middle of her spine, the other loosely clasping her hand. Occasionally, he would make small corrections to her posture and every time his skin met hers he felt a jolt that nearly put him off his step.

“See?” he said, “you have the feel of it. It is very simple once you repeat it a hundred or so times.”

She laughed. It was like passing from underneath a rain cloud into the sun. He had a sudden desperate urge to make her laugh again. He wanted to feel that way always.

“Here,” he said, putting his hand on the side of her ribcage. She flinched slightly when he touched her and sucked in a quick breath as well, but she lowered her face away from him in an attempt to hide it.

“Hold your torso very still,” he instructed. “All of your upper body should move as one uninterrupted piece, arms, waist, breast, together.”

“Your hands,” Mary said, suddenly alarmed. “Are you still suffering the effects of your…malady?” she asked, lowering her voice.

Bewildered, Jed looked down at his hands, one upon her waist, the other on her shoulder. Indeed, they were trembling.

“No,” he said honestly.

They both were very still then. There was an odd look in Mary’s big, expressive eyes. A kind of urgency co-mingled with fear. This was the sort of moment the two of them were so careful to avoid. The sort of moment, in fact, when Mary would usually step away and excuse herself.

But she had not. She did not. Instead, she was standing right there with the ambit of his arms, her face perhaps three inches from his own.

It was inexplicable (and annoying) that he should think of the Green sisters at such a time as this. And yet he found himself remembering Emma Green’s reaction to his search for a dress. Her immediate, unquestioning assumption that he was looking to purchase a gift for his wife; that he was the sort of man, in fact, who thought of his wife when she wasn’t around and procured things to delight her, the way the Baron apparently had for Mary.

Emma Green believed that, though he was a Yankee, he was still a good man. As she undoubtedly believed that Mary was a good woman. In Mary’s case, though, she was correct. Mary was perhaps the finest of women and it would not be fair if anyone thought her anything less than that because of his weakness, his attachments.

Jed had begun his small mission with the hope of restoring something lost to Mary. It would be very bitter indeed if all he wound up doing was taking something from her instead.

And so Jed withdrew, pulling his hands away from her body. “There, now you’ve had a proper ball experience, clumsy, awkward partner included.”

A momentary look of something like loss flashed across Mary face but then she laughed, only sounding a little forced.

“Pardon me,” Jed told her, “I must go transcribe some notes.” And write a letter to Eliza, the way any husband would when separated from the woman he was supposed to love best in all the world.

His hands were still shaking, all the way down the hall and back to his own room. Indeed, he was beginning to wonder if he would ever feel steady again.


End file.
